In the absence of enforceable contracts, many economic and personal interactions rely on trust and reciprocity. Research shows that although this reliance often works well, sometimes it breaks down. Simple rules mandating minimum standards on reciprocation prevent the most egregious trust...

In an experiment using two consecutive trust games, we study how “cheap” signals such as promises and messages are used to restore damaged trust and encourage new trust where it did not previously exist. In these games, trustees made non-binding promises of investment-contingent returns,...

This work experimentally examines forecasting and trading behavior. Subjects play the role of both analyst and shareholder over the course of experiments consisting of a series of repeated games with or absent con icts of interest. In a stylized trading setting, I test whether standard...

We design an experiment to study individual behavior in a strategic information setting where the sender has economic incentives to deceive and the receiver has economic incentives to avoid deception. To ascertain whether subjects in the role of receiver glean information content from the...

This article develops a method for drawing samples from which it is impossible to infer any quantile or moment of the underlying distribution. The method provides researchers with a way to give subjects the experience of ambiguity. In any experiment, learning the distribution from experience is...

We compare the determinants of individual giving between two countries, Spain and the US, which differ in their redistribution policies and their beliefs over the causes of poverty. By varying the information about the determinants of income, we find that, although overall giving is similar in...

Conflict and competition often impose costs on both winners and losers, and conflicting parties may prefer to resolve the dispute before it occurs. The equilibrium of a conflict game with side-payments predicts that with binding offers, proposers make and responders accept side-payments,...

This article experimentally studies a two-stage elimination contest and compares its performance with a one-stage contest. Contrary to the theory, the two-stage contest generates higher revenue than the equivalent one-stage contest. There is significant over-dissipation in both stages of the...

We design an experiment to test if the manner in which subjects receive the endowment has any bearing on the amount of overbidding in contests. We find that overbidding is significantly higher when subjects are given a large per-experiment endowment rather than when the endowment is given...